In certain industries, e.g. the glass industry and industries that fabricate or utilize sheet metal, workers must work with materials having sharp edges. The workers wear cut-resistant, gloves to protect their hands against injury.
Cloth gloves, in particular, and even leather gloves do not provide as good gripping characteristics as desired because the glove surface is not especially slip-resistant. They are also not as cut resistant as desired. Highly cut resistant gloves made of yarn having steel strands, synthetic fibers, often high strength synthetic fibers, are available but for some industrial uses they are not as slip-resistant as desired. Attempts to improve such gloves have involved the use of polyvinylchloride (PVC) dots adhered to the glove surface. The PVC did not wet the yarn effectively, requiring that the dots be wide to provide greater surface area for adherence to the fibers. These dots required high temperatures to apply and cure, which were not compatible with some synthetic fibers used in glove substrates, and the dots were not sufficiently slip-resistant, abrasion resistant and flexible to assure optimum performance. In addition, they were relatively thick so that it was primarily only the dots rather than the dots and the supporting fabric between the dots that would contact a surface being gripped, resulting in a lack of feel by the wearer and a diminishing of the surface area in contact with the object being gripped, which diminished the potential gripping ability.